A housing charity today revealed that almost 5,000 people in Yorkshire and the Humber region are homeless as it launched an urgent appeal for support.

Shelter’s new report revealed that a total of 4,813 people in the region were homeless - the equivalent of one in every 1,127 people.

The extensive review combined official rough sleeping, temporary accommodation and social services figures, but the charity said the true scale was likely to be even higher as government figures were not definitive.

Tracey Nathan, Shelter’s Sheffield hub manager, said: “It’s shocking to think that today, thousands of people are waking up homeless.

"Some will have spent the night shivering on a cold pavement, others crammed into a dingy hostel room with their children. And what is worse, many are simply unaccounted for.”

She said the charity spoke every day to people suffering because of the failure to build enough affordable homes and the impact of welfare cuts.

The top five homeless hotspots and how Yorkshire's largest city compares.

The report also studied figures at local authority level to identify the areas in our region with the highest levels of homelessness per head.

The list was topped by Doncaster, where one in every 642 people are homeless.

It was followed by Hull, Wakefield, Harrogate and Bradford.

Coun Martin Tett, housing spokesman for the Local Government Association, said councils were doing all they could to help homeless people but the cost of funding temporary accommodation had trebled in three years.

Highlighting the need for greater government funding, he said: “The upcoming autumn Budget is an opportunity to take steps to adapt welfare reforms to ensure housing remains affordable for low-income families, and allow councils to borrow to invest in building genuinely affordable homes once more.”

But a Department for Communities and Local Government spokesman said it was investing £950m by 2020 to help tackle homelessness and bringing in the Homelessness Reduction Act, which requires councils to provide early support to those at risk.

He added that a £2bn funding boost to build more social housing, including council homes, had also been announced.

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